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Review: ‘Criterion Designs’

Physical media now, physical media tomorrow, physical media forever!

Criterion collection
December 20, 2014

A while back, during one of Barnes and Noble’s frequent half-off Criterion Collection sales, a friend on social media snarked, "half off a DVD, or still way more than the cost of a subscription to Hulu, where you can stream every Criterion disc."

The joke, like much great humor, was equal parts funny and sad. Funny, because it’s true, of course, and reveals something about a society that is slowly but surely giving up on physical media. Sad, because its very truth reveals how much we have lost in the drive to elevate content—digital data, bits, ones and zeroes compressed as much as possible in order to offer cheap and fast downloadability—over every other concern.

For those of you not in the know, the Criterion Collection has since 1984 offered the best in home video. First as a producer of laserdiscs, then DVDs, now Blu-rays and streaming, Criterion has made it its mission to provide landmark moments in cinema history to the public in the finest quality possible. The movies themselves are presented in their original aspect ratios, with painstaking transfers made from the highest quality prints available. These efforts are oftentimes overseen by the directors themselves, and the final discs are loaded with extras.

The film, however, is only half the joy of owning a Criterion disc. Consider also the booklet that accompanies every release, each of which contain brand new essays from film critics and film scholars and filmmakers, as well as little tidbits about the process of making the film or discarded pieces of art. (More on discarded art in a moment.)

Let’s not ignore the vainest, and arguably most important, aspect of being a connoisseur of the Criterion Collection: the ability to show off one’s status as a person of good taste. In my own manse, the Criterion Collection owns pride of place in my Blu-ray collection, sitting perched atop all the other discs. Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game resides next to Michael Mann’s Thief, which sits a few discs down from Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing, itself several titles away from Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai and … well, you get the idea.

Curation! The creation of a façade with which to show the world what we like. Or, rather, who we think we are. Or, rather still, who we want people to think we are. "What really matters is what you like, not what you are like," the snotty record store owner in High Fidelity says. "Books, records, films, these things matter. Call me shallow. It’s the fucking truth." It is. And there is no handier tool in the curator’s arsenal than the Criterion Collection.

But for those who really want to up the ante—or worry that their dinner guests won’t spend enough time perusing their Blu-ray shelves while consuming their painstakingly crafted postprandial—the Criterion Collection has something just for you: Criterion Designs, a new oversized and overstuffed book featuring Criterion Collection cover art, the stories behind the commissions, and discarded designs.

With its stark, grey, cover—a die-cut C carved into the front, revealing cartoons representing decades of cinematic history—Criterion Designs will look fantastic on any coffee table. Even more importantly, it will provide hours of entertainment for those who flip through it. "The curated selection is not intended to be a history of Criterion design or a best-of, or to be exhaustive in any way," Criterion chief Peter Becker wrote in an introduction to the book. "The projects represented here were often the troublemakers, the ones with no decent artwork to begin with, or annoying legal requirements, or films so iconic that making a new image for them seemed like madness in the first place."

Sweet Smell of Success falls into the "annoying legal requirements" category; in the pages recounting its design, we learn that the contract required Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster’s heads to be the same size—a requirement that "couldn’t have been more antithetical to the themes of the film," we’re told. It’s fun to see how they squared that circle.

It’s fascinating to see what the book dedicates space to. For instance, Andrzej Wajda’s Danton—a relatively minor entry in the Collection’s catalogue, though one of my personal favorites—receives a four page spread, complete with numerous sketches by artist Riccardo Vecchio of various figures of the French Revolution. Some avec heads, some sans, naturally.

Fans of the series will delight in flipping through the book’s final pages, as we are treated to an archive of covers from the collection. It’s interesting to see the Collection’s evolution: early releases included artier classics such as Citizen Kane and Grand Illusion and The Seventh Seal, of course, but also more popular fare such as The Princess Bride and Ghostbusters and The Wizard of Oz. Interestingly, the final laserdisc entry in this visual catalogue is Armageddon.

That willingness to mix the popular with the art house—to acknowledge the genius of Bergman and Bay alike—has long been the secret to the Criterion Collection’s success. Physical media may be dying. But here’s hoping that Criterion has at least 30 more years for us.

Published under: Book reviews